


Responses to "I Love You"

by Leonawriter



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Found Family, Friendship, Inspired by tumblr memes and art, Love, Minific drabbles, Missing Scene, Multi, speculative stuff that's probably gonna get jossed but who cares
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-08
Updated: 2018-07-08
Packaged: 2019-06-07 11:12:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15217919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leonawriter/pseuds/Leonawriter
Summary: People say "I love you" in different ways. Everyone also has a different way of responding to it, too.





	Responses to "I Love You"

**Author's Note:**

> [Inspired by this art!](https://leonawriter.tumblr.com/post/175676099934/etoari-ive-been-meaning-to-draw-this-quote) Cross-posted from Tumblr. I hope you enjoy.

1\. **Riku**

“You’ve got to be more careful now, you know,” Kairi was saying. “You’re a keyblade master now! You’re really important to a lot of people. You can’t just throw yourself at things like you used to. Besides, we love you too much to see you get hurt like that.” 

 _Again_  was left unsaid. _Again_  didn’t _need_  to be said.

“I know,” he says, looking away slightly, not feeling as though he’s really worthy of that love yet, like he’s still got so much to atone for, but knowing that they do love him all the same makes him smile despite himself.

“You’d better,” Kairi says, hitting him playfully on the shoulder.

* * *

 

2\. **Xion**

She can feel herself becoming more Sora by the day, by the hour, by the minute, and she’s a Nobody, not even a Nobody but a _Replica_ , she shouldn’t be able to feel scared, or hurt - but then, maybe these feelings aren’t hers, and they’re just Sora’s, leaking out into her like the rest of his heart.

“ _Go on, you just keep running, but I’ll always be there to bring you back!”_

She’s sat on her bed in her room in the castle, knees up to her chest, and her mind brings up the memory of someone else. Not even _her_  memory.

Her hand goes up to her mouth at the emotions she shouldn’t be able to feel. Not _her_  emotions. Just like nothing really was - always someone else’s, always stolen, always just a little out of the picture, out of the room.

“I’m- I’m sorry, I’m _sorry,”_  she finds herself saying, choking on the words. 

She doesn’t know who to. 

* * *

 

3\. **Lea**

It’s enough to get him to tense and stiffen and Lea _hates_  the fact that he can feel his hand and heart start to call for his keyblade, but the sight of Isa getting like this reminds him of why Axel knew that Saix was one of those few in the Organisation no one, even himself, had ever wanted to cross.

It reminds him of Saix, eyes sickly yellow, bearing  down on him with the Claymore.

“I’m doing this for _you_  - I’m going with you because I need- I need to do _something- after everything I did-”_  Isa closes his eyes, and maybe that helps Isa calm down out of that rage but it doesn’t help Lea because now Lea can’t see the colour of his eyes, and now part of him is always going to be afraid that when Isa opens them, they’ll be yellow again. “I’m not a Nobody anymore, Lea. I’m not even one of Xehanort’s puppets. I care about you enough that, yes. I am willing to go that far.”

Isa opens his eyes, and he looks certain of himself, serious, but… calmer. His eyes are the same as he remembers them from back when they were kids, from a few minutes ago, from the other day. Not quite blue, not quite green. No yellow in sight.

“Yeah,” he says weakly, “but y’know - I’m the one with the fire element and the keyblade, right? So I’m the one who should be doing the stupid shit.”

He sees Isa smile, nothing like the ones he had seen Saix ever have, and _nothing_  like the ones he’d seen from Xehanort-possessed Saix.

“As if I’d have you any other way,” Isa says, and it’s weird - in the good way - the way his face looks all fond, because Saix never looked at him fondly, and Isa always used to look  _exasperated_ when they were kids-

Lea laughs, makes guns with his hands, and backs away.

The feelings are too much, too fast, too _new_  - even his friendship with Roxas and- knowing Sora, neither could really prepare him for _this._

* * *

 

4\. **Sora**

Kairi finds him playing around with his Dream Eaters, and he sees her there when she sits down to just watch, smiling at him.

“You know, I still find myself amazed by how much we’ve all been through sometimes,” she says, and he overbalances, falling over and causing a few of the others to scatter around him.

He laughs it off, and sits properly this time, scratching at the back of his head.

“It sure is a lot come to think, huh?” 

“Yeah… it sure is.” She hugs her arms around her chest for a moment, and he wishes that there were some way to make all of her worries go away, just like that. “I guess… all I really want is to know that everyone’s going to come back okay from this. I don’t… I don’t want to lose any of you again.”

It would be easy to wilt and to feel bad for how she’d already lost him more than once, how they’d lost Riku, and how they were just going to keep on putting themselves back into danger.

But that’d be counterproductive, and besides-

“You’re not gonna lose me, silly! I’m right here, see?”

Kairi was training to fight, too. She understood.

She laughed, and he grinned, because _victory! Job done!_

 _“_ Never change, Sora. We like you just the way you are.”

“Doesn’t everyone?” he asked - with his tongue stuck out, trying not to think of how close he had come recently to being scarily _not_  himself at all.

* * *

 

5\. **Terranort**

The worst thing about the Realm of Darkness was never truly feeling sure what was real, and what was simply an illusion, created from the darkness in your own heart.

Aqua had learned not to trust her eyes long ago, but she had also come to the decision that, no matter what, she would always try to find her friends if she thought that they were there, no matter how unrealistic it was for them to be where she was.

She sees Terra standing on an outcropping, a cliff looking out onto a sea of darkness, waiting for her. She knows, she _knows_  that he can’t be here, she _knows_  that the last time she saw him, something had happened, that she couldn’t always trust his face…

She went regardless. Even if it was simply the darkness feeding off of her insecurities, the sight of her friend would do more for her than anything else in this bleak world.

“Terra…? Terra, it’s me.”

He turns around, and smiles - for a moment, she hopes, despite herself, in spite of how _different_  he looks.

“You’re still here, are you? I would have thought _someone_ would come to rescue you from this place by _now.”_

She steeled herself, and fought back the frustration, the worry that this was the one that Terra had saved her from, of how badly things could go. 

“I could have left,” she says evenly. “I could have found a way out. But I chose not to, because there were other people who needed that help far more than I did.” She shakes her head. “Just like I’ll help you. Like I’ll help _Terra._  Our hearts are connected; there’s no way that I won’t.”

“Oh, Aqua…”

His face softened, as he reached out to touch her. She tensed, uncertain, torn between suspicion and desperation.

“…if only there were someone who loved you.”

Her keyblade appeared in her hand before he could finish reaching out toward her, but the vision of Terra - or someone with Terra’s face, at least - vanished into whips of smoke and darkness, leaving Aqua on her knees, trying to ignore the sting in her eyes that turned into wet patches on the hard ground, knowing that she would have to move again soon or the Heartless would simply converge on her in swarms.

* * *

 

5\. **Terra**

It’s still odd, seeing him like this - she’d seen him so many times over the years, but it had either not been _Terra_ , or it hadn’t even been him at all.

And now here he was, older and wiser and more hurt and more dark, but then so was she. 

“I don’t… I don’t see how I can make up for everything I did. Even if Xemnas wasn’t _me_ , it… it was still my body. I can _remember_ \- and I just…”

“Just so long as you remember that you aren’t the  _only_ one Xehanort manipulated, or the only one who… fell to the darkness.” 

She was still coming to terms with that herself. The only positive to the whole situation she’d been in was, as far as she could see, that she could now understand Terra’s perspective far more than she ever could have before. 

“I know that,” he said. “I _know._  But no one else, none of the others, helped him do as much damage as I did. None of them. I hurt _so many people_ , Aqua. Just because I couldn’t see Xehanort for who he was-”

“We were kids,” she said firmly, and bluntly. “I don’t think any of us really knew what we were doing, back then. And besides,” she adds, as a lighter note, “it was the thought of you and Ven that kept me going all this time. I knew where Ven was, so I kept hoping… hoping I’d see you.”

Terra looked away, averting his eyes with a sigh, hand clenching. 

“A horrible decision, really. We all know how that turned out.”

She shook her head with a sad smile.

“I wouldn’t say that. I’m talking to you now and we’re both okay, right? That means everything’s going to get better. We just have to believe in that.”


End file.
